“Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, described the problems at Walter Reed in words that should be inscribed on portals across every bridge leading into Washington: ‘Life every day in this system is like running in hip boots in a swamp.' He called it a ‘bureaucratic morass.'”

There's a colorful phrase. How many of us work in an environment like that? I'm lucky that I don't currently work in that sort of environment, but I have before. I think many manufacturing companies could be described as that sort of morass.

Our goal with lean should be to destroy that sort of bureaucracy and waste. But, the Catch-22 is that it can be very hard to get started with lean when things are that bureaucratic.

I've described two types of “pre-lean” companies:

Those that are good at “non-lean” things, they get stuff done, just the wrong stuff (e.g., expediting, counting parts, fighting fires)

Those that aren't good at doing anything, things don't get done at all

Type 1 companies, I'd argue, have more hope than Type 2 companies. Type 1 workplaces have to have their energy and “get-it-done-ness” harnessed in the lean direction. Might be hard, but there's some hope. Type 2 workplaces are so demoralized and lethargic or flat-out paralyzed with bureaucracy. Moving to lean in that environment will be quite a challenge, generally speaking.

One other thing from the WSJ article, sounds like a classic description of waste and a non value-stream focus:

Wounded soldiers are having to negotiate this waste. “Stove pipes” or “silos” — the disconnected workings of separate departments – that leads to waste. Very often, the handoffs between silos are botched or delayed. Often, each silo has very poor visibility into what the upstream and downstream silos are doing.

The lean approach and Value Stream management push us to start looking across departments, looking at the whole process and the whole value stream. From an office standpoint (or administrative processes), we have to start breaking down department boundaries. Maybe we have to re-organize the work and space so that people who used to be in different departments are now sitting side by side and working together. If disparate IT systems are creating or maintaining the silo boundaries, we have to work toward a single IT system so the entire value stream can work together.

It sounds like fixing the Walter Reed mess will take more than just firing some people. I hope they can fix the system.